Fox in the henhouse...April news from the French countryside
Dear friend,
« Saint-Esprit ! dit-il en se signant, défends mon corps de mort et de prison ! »
“Holy Spirit!” cried he, crossing himself. “Protect my body from death and prison!”
Henry paused, looking up from the pages of the book from which he was reading aloud. Little Clotilde’s eyes were very round. Eugénie, at six, was impatient to hear the next part. But Madame Francine, who had been listening to the reading lesson while she peeled potatoes, sighed deeply. A tear welled up in her large blue eyes, which she wiped away on a corner of her apron.
Our gardien looked at his wife. Although Monsieur Xavier had his glasses on his nose and the paper in front of them, he had been listening to the story as well.
“Ah, mon amie, vous êtes en dueil !" he said, with bemused tenderness. “Still in mourning!”
Henry resumed the narrative.
“He had awakened from a terrible dream, in which something was coming towards him in the farmyard, something wearing a red fur coat with little black points. Strangely, the fur was on the outside of the coat! And it completely covered the thing’s head. All you could see were its teeth.”
“Le renard!” cried Clotilde, shuddering.
“Le goupil!” corrected Eugènie with the smugness of a confident student. "Renard is his name, but goupil means fox.”
Not many French children would understand this distinction. But that's one of the unexpected benefits of le confinement. The little cousins’ erudite mother has been their teacher while schools are closed. And in fact, goupil is the old French word for the vulpine predator. The commonly used word renard, meanwhile, derives from the medieval compilation of French stories about a trickster fox named Renart. These stories, which first appeared in French in the 12th century, and were rapidly translated into German and English, have never ceased to fascinate and amuse. Scholars of folklore see them as social and political satires; children love them.
Henry took up the tale again.
“Remember,” he advised. “Just before he had the dream, Chantecler’s wife Pinte warned him about something lurking in the cabbage leaves. But what did he say?”
Eugènie ducked her head toward the pages and read:
“Taisez-vous, sotte que vous êtes, dit fièrement Chantecler, comment un goupil, un putois même pourrait-il entrer ici : la haie n’est-elle pas trop serrée ? Dormez tranquilles ; après tout, je suis là pour vous défendre. »
“Be silent, foolish as you are, how could a fox, even a weasel, enter: the hedge is tightly woven. Sleep calmly; for I am here to defend you!” He puffed out his chest and strutted off to the dung heap in search of worms.
Chantecler doesn't like to listen to his favorite wife, Pinte. This illustration is from a 1903 edition of the ever-popular Roman de Renart. The image at the head of the Letter is from a 16th-century illustration of the stories.
Francine looked out the window at her henhouse, a box stall in the stables. No cheerful cackles to be heard this morning! Six lovely new hens and the rooster are missing, strongly presumed eaten by a fox. Her husband focused his attention on the newspaper.
Several lines later, Renart has flattered Chantecler, the farmyard rooster, into closing his eyes to show how loudly he can crow. Deadly as an arrow, the fox pounces.
"Que vais- je devenir, privée de mon époux, de mon seigneur, de tout ce que j’aimais au monde !" wails Pinte, lacking any feminist self-reliance, as she sees her husband, her lord, all that she loved in the world, between Renart’s toothy jaws. “What will become of me?”
“Haro, haro!” cries la vieille, the old lady whose job it was to guard the henhouse.
“Notez, les filles,” interjected Henry, as erudite as their mother. “Crying “haro” is an ancient Norman custom. You cry “haro” if someone is committing a crime, like stealing a chicken. Anyone who hears must come to your defense.”
The invading Vikings, he went on, gave not only their name to Normandy in the 9th century, but also imposed their legal system. The Norseman’s code was the first in French territory to be written down. It was also the first to be translated from Latin into the vernacular, in about 1300. And so firmly did the independent Normans hold to their "Grand Coutumier" that it endured almost a thousand years, until abolished by the French Revolution and Napoleon’s Code Civil in 1804.
In 1087 A.D., the impoverished Asselin opposed "clameur de haro" against the burial of William the Conqueror in the church of Saint Etienne in Caen, built on his father's land. "Publicly, therefore, in the sight of God and man, do I claim my inheritance, and protest against the body of the plunderer being covered with my turf." Asselin was indemnified. A 19th-century print.
The adults in the room nodded thoughtfully. The little girls clamored for more about Chantecler and Renart.
Upon the old lady’s “clameur de haro,” the farmer, the dogs and the other servants give chase. The fox only runs the faster.
But « on l’a dit bien souvent ; il n’est sage qui parfois ne folie.” No one is wise who doesn’t sometimes lose his good sense! And Renart, tickled by his own cleverness, is incited by Chantecler to taunt his pursuers. When the fox opens his mouth to hurl an insult, the cock flies to the safety of an apple tree. From this lofty perch, he invites his “beau cousin” to reflect on their “changement de fortunes.”
“A curse upon the mouth that speaks, when it should keep shut,” laments Renart.
“Yes, and let “la malegoute” afflict the eye that closes when it should stay open,” repents Chantecler.
After this moment of mutual honesty, Chantecler goes home to his “toute belle Pinte.” And the wily Renart, on this beautiful spring day
“temps où monte la fleur sur l’aubépin, où les bois, les prés reverdissent, où les oiseaux disent, nuit et jour, chansons nouvelles,”
"when the bud opens on the hawthorn tree, when woods and pastures are clothed in green, when the birds do sing new songs both day and night," must return to his lair without a morsel of food for his dear Hermeline and their little family.
Fortunately, as succeeding chapters show, Renart has more tricks to play…
But that is literature. Nature is harsher. In our case, Francine’s hens and their handsome rooster are gone. And many a wily fox, stuffed with straw, has been transformed into an umbrella stand at the front door of a French chateau.
Meanwhile, spring is underway in the countryside around Chateau de Courtomer, just as it was when Pierre de Saint Cloud first wrote down the adventures of Renart in 1170.
The first pear blossoms have appeared on twigs and branches espaliered against the walled garden of the Orangerie. And the colza is flowering in the big fields in front of the Chateau, two seas of yellow rape that part on either side of a green pathway leading from our park to the bourg of Courtomer.
A pear blossoms against the sun-warmed stone wall of the garden.
The little girls rush out to play.
“We’re going to practice flying, in case a fox comes!” announces Eugènie.
“Like Chantecler!” cries Clotilde, following her sister.
While it looks as though we will have plenty of pears from the garden to put on the table this summer, our farmer Monsieur Jean-Yves refuses to take heart – yet -- regarding the colza. As we wrote last week, a severe drop in temperatures brought snow and a hard freeze, blighting buds in orchards and vineyards all over France. It’s the most extensive frost damage in the country since 1947, according to Monsieur Xavier's newspaper.
“Wait ten days,” Jean-Yves says, looking out at the golden ocean of rapeseed, “then we’ll see if the flowers turn black or not.”
Though I don’t like to mention it, I wonder if he is speculating about the future price of colza. If our crop has been spared, while elsewhere freezing temperatures have decimated the harvest…
As another pithy French saying goes, “à une chose, malheur est bon.” It’s an ill wind that blows no-one any good. It was hard on Renart and Hermeline when Chantecler escaped. But a happy ending for Pinte, not to mention Chantecler.
Our own farmer drives home for lunch with a cheerful glint in his eye. And we turn our attention to the flying lessons in the farmyard.
A bientôt, mes amis !
P.S. Let us welcome you to the Chateau or to our newly renovated Farmhouse. Please write to Heather or Béatrice (both are bilingual in English and French), or, of course to me, at info@chateaudecourtomer.com. We look forward to hearing from you!